He leaned suddenly toward the window.
“Ah! Here comes Arnesson. Looks a bit excited.”
A few moments later there was the sound of a key in the front door, and Arnesson strode down the hall. When he saw us he came quickly into the drawing-room and, without a word of greeting, burst forth:
“What’s this I hear about Sprigg being shot?” His eager eyes darted from one to the other of us. “I suppose you’re here to ask me about him. Well, fire away.” He threw a bulky brief-case on the centre-table and sat down abruptly on the edge of a straight chair. “There was a detective up at college this morning asking fool questions and acting like a burlesque sleuth in a comic opera. Very mysterious. . . . Murder—horrible murder! What did we know about a certain John E. Sprigg? And so on. . . . Scared a couple of juniors out of an entire semester’s mental growth, and sent a harmless young English instructor into incipient nervous collapse. I didn’t see the Dogberry myself—was in class at the time. But he had the cheek to ask what women Sprigg went around with. Sprigg and women! That boy didn’t have a thought in his head but his work. Brightest man in senior math. Never missed a class. When he didn’t answer roll-call this morning I knew something serious was the matter. At the lunch hour every one was buzzing about murder. . . . What’s the answer?”
“We haven’t the answer, Mr. Arnesson.” Vance had been watching him closely. “However, we have another determinant for your formula. Johnny Sprig was shot this morning with a little gun through the middle of his wig.”
Arnesson stared at Vance for some time without moving. Then he threw his head back and gave a sardonic laugh.
“Some more mumbo-jumbo, eh?—like the death of Cock Robin. . . . Read me the rune.”
Vance gave him briefly the details of the crime.
“That’s all we know at present,” he concluded. “Could you, Mr. Arnesson, add any suggestive details?”
“Good Lord, no!” The man appeared genuinely amazed. “Not a thing. Sprigg . . . one of the keenest students I ever had. Something of a genius, by Gad! Too bad his parents named him John—plenty of other names. It sealed his doom apparently; got him shot through the head by a maniac. Obviously the same merry-andrew who did Robin in with an arrow.” He rubbed his hands together,—the abstract philosopher in him had become uppermost. “A nice problem. You’ve told me everything? I’ll need every known integer. Maybe I’ll hit upon a new mathematical method in the process—like Kepler.” He chuckled over the conceit. “Remember Kepler’s ‘Doliometrie’? It became the foundation of Infinitesimal Calculus. He arrived at it trying to construct a cask for his wine—a cask with a minimum amount of wood and a maximum cubical content. Maybe the formulas I work out to solve these crimes will open up new fields of scientific research. Ha! Robin and Sprigg will then become martyrs.”